In the context of massive Internet firms, competition is unlikely. Most start-ups today aim to be bought by a company like Google or Facebook, not to displace them. [...]

[...] Legislators are beginning to address that by proposing bills that would make long-term unemployment an illicit basis for hiring decisions. But number crunchers may simply feed “length of time since last job” into their hiring models, and if that factor is weighted heavily, it could be utterly decisive. Future legislators need to take into account the ease with which big data mongers can do an end run around law designed for an analog age. For example, in the case of “time since last job,” they may allow it to be up to 15 percent of a “hiring score,” but no more. Just as accounting rules had to adjust to accommodate firms increasingly complex and fractional interests in other firms, laws governing credit and employment decisions need to become far more specific about the extent to which a forbidden ground of decision making can enter into scores meant to influence decisions.

However ambitiously American finance regulators may set standards, their efforts are compromised by the internationalization of major firms, which plead that any stringent national standard for recording information may make it harder to do business overseas. They want to wait for international coordination—a process that could take decades. Or they could simply move their trading overseas.

[...] Playing catch-up with the banks and the scorers and the Internet giants just reinforces their power over us. We should be challenging their rules, not trying to keep ahead of them.